The Mobile Versions Of 'PUBG' Look Great, But There's A Catch

PUBG's two mobile games look like a blast, but they're only available in China.Credit: Tencent/Bluehole

Popular 'Battle Royale' game PUBG has finally come to mobile devices, and it looks surprisingly good.

In fact, players have been praising the game as a surprisingly good mobile port. Alex Walker of Kotaku Australia writes that "surprisingly, a game that relies on massive draw distances and 100 players running around a single server actually holds up well on mobile."

In PUBG, 100 players drop into a sprawling map and try to survive until just one is left standing. There are actually two mobile games based on this concept. The first is called PlayerUknown's Battlegrounds: Army Attack which is a smaller, arcade version of the game with a larger focus on vehicular combat, including naval and air combat. The second, and more recent release, is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds: Exhilerating Battlefield. This game is closer to the official PUBG on PC and Xbox One, both in how it plays and how it looks. Both games are available on Android and iOS.

The catch, of course, is that both these games are exclusive to China, and while Western gamers can download and play them, they're only in Chinese. Depending on how good your Mandarin is, you may have a tough time reading menus and item descriptions.

Both games have skyrocketed to the top of Chinese mobile game charts:

Both games have instantly jumped to the top of the download charts on iOS. The games had 75 million pre-registrations. So that shows you how huge the demand was for PUBG on mobile. pic.twitter.com/GhTRPmyMCu

Here's the gameplay trailer for Army Attack, showing off the game's use of vehicles on land, sea and air, making it quite a different beast than traditional PUBG:

Compare that to Exhilarating Battlefield which looks incredibly similar to the PC/console version:

I'm holding out trying either of these until they see a Western release. While that may never happen, I find it hard to believe that Chinese mega-publisher Tencent would pass up the opportunity, given how popular PUBG is on PC and Xbox One.

I'm also a bit skeptical of shooters on mobile---touchscreen controls and first-person shooters don't exactly go hand-in-hand. Then again, a game like this makes more sense on mobile than say, Call of Duty.

In related news, the PC version of the game is suffering from an ongoing cheat crisis. Cheaters, 99% of whom are from China, have flooded the game in recent months, leading to many players calling for a region lock that separates Chinese players from the rest of the population. That's a good idea, but one that developer Bluehole isn't currently pursuing.